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Imperial Entanglements of Policing

Book

Pages: 404

Illustrations: 3 illustrations

Release Date: November 03, 2026

Contributors: Sabrina Axster, Beaujon, Danielle, Karl Hapal, Steffen Jensen, Kathryn Takabvirwa, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Matthew Guariglia, Markus-Michael Mu¨ller, Andy Clarno, Jesse Wozniak, Enrique Alvear, Maya Van Nuys, Zoha Waseem, Colleen Bell, Lou Pingeot

Subjects
Prisons, Police, and Abolition, Sociology, Postcolonial and Colonial Studies

In recent years, people across the world have protested the violence of policing and its intrusion into everyday lives, and the close timing of these global movements is no coincidence. As Imperial Entanglements of Policing shows, a central reason for the remarkable similarities of policing around the globe is empire. Across the entire sweep of modern policing, there have been strong, mutual connections among police forces via tactics, training, technology, and ideology. Contributors investigate these imperial entanglements in diverse sites around the world, from cities like New York, Santiago, and Johannesburg to countries like the Philippines, Algeria, Britain, and Iraq. Together, they examine a range of policing practices and tactics, such as the impact of American, German, and United Nations policing consultants being employed across the world and the influence of technology and ideology on these encounters. They highlight the ways imperial power was and continues to be perpetrated through police power, how it has evolved in service of imperial goals, and its connection with sites of imperial control.

Praise

“This volume breaks important new ground in our understanding of the global dimensions of policing. These interventions move beyond both decontextualized local case studies and comparative studies that fail to consider the ways that global power arrangements fundamentally shape local policing. In the process, they have set a new bar for best practices in policing research.” - Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing

“Imperial Entanglements of Policing offers desperately needed new ways of thinking about and studying policing. Through its magnificent framework of imperial entanglements and insistence that policing today is imperial in ancestry and therefore materiality, the collection denatures the police as analytic object, making visible the matrix in which police act and showing how racial capitalism is the imperial system policing commits itself to defend.” - Micol Seigel, author of Violence Work

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Julian Go is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Stuart Schrader is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Policing and Empire / Julian Go and Stuart Schrader 1
Part I. Colonial Lineages
1. Vagrancy Laws, Colonialism, and the Policing of Misdemeanors / Sabrina Axster 31
2. The Peddlers and the Police: Colonial Control and Resistance in Algiers / Danielle Beaujon 53
3. Violent Politics and Counterinsurgency Under Duterte: Imperial Entanglements of Policing in the Philippines / Karl Hapal and Steffen Jensen 77
4. Xenophobia, Policing, and the Remaking of Blackness in South Africa / Kathryn Takabvirwa 105
5. Against Institutions: Radical Routes of Anti-Imperialism and Abolition / Adam Elliott-Cooper 129
Part II. Between Metropole and Colony
6. Identifying US Colonial Subjects: A Brief Global Policing History / Matthew Guariglia 153
7. Teutonic Legacies: Germany and the Latin American “Police-Military Continuum” / Markus-Michael Müller 163
8. Unraveling the Webs of Imperial Policing: From Palestine to Chicago and Back / Andy Clarno 187
9. Shaping the State and Its People: Capitalism and the Development of Police Power and Practice in Iraq and the United States / Jesse Wozniak 213
10. Baltimore’s Imperial Entanglements: Rethinking and Re-Siting the Methodology of Critical Police Studies / Stuart Schrader 237
Part III. The International-Imperial
11. Bringing Empire Back In: How US “Broken Windows” Becomes Imperial Policing in Santiago, Chile / Enrique Alvear Moreno 263
12. Better or Best? International Organizations and the Production of Norms in Transnational Policing / Maya Van Nuys 303
13. Safe Assistance? Cultivating Imperial Entanglements of (G)localized Police Reform and Counterinsurgency in Pakistan / Zoha Waseem 321
14. Policing the “Other” at Home and Abroad: Canadian International Police Deployments and the Production of Difference / Colleen Bell and Lou Pingeot 351
Contributors 375
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3899-3 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3404-9 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6257-8 /